Meme time!

In no particular order:

• Gorecki – Lamb. Our wedding  song About finding that person that just completes you, that complements and helps you want to be a better person. A beautiful song and a beautiful voice.
• Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana. Changed everything, and yet so simple. Influenced a generation.
• Shame – Stabbing Westward. My favourite angsty teenage song. Once went to a Live (the band) concert just to see Stabbing Westward play support, and then left The man has an incredible voice.
• H – Tool. I love a lot of the older Tool music, this particular one reminds me of  a close friend who died very young in very unfortunate circumstances.
• We’re in this together – Nine Inch Nails. I love pretty much every NIN song, but this one really talks to me about regardless of everything going on, none of us are truly alone.
• Fade to Black – Metallica. One of their best songs, and one that influenced me to learn guitar in the first place.
• Burn – The Cure. an amazing (and dark) song from The Crow soundtrack. One of their best in my opinion. Admittedly takes me back to school
• Cornflake Girl – Tori Amos. Beautiful, powerful and disturbing. Worth looking into the deeper meaning.
• Classical Gas – Mason Williams. An incredible guitar piece that puts me in an almost meditative state when I play it. Technically challenging but also a joy to play and listen to.
• Pathetique – Beethoven. Such an exquisite piano piece, and when played well covers about the entire scope of human emotion. Fun to play too, but I’ve yet to master it

There are so many more songs I love, and I’m sure given more time I’d rejig this another dozen times. So I’ll leave it there Apart from one last honorary mention:

• Space Cadet – Kyuss. Couldn’t leave this off. This 3 person rock band had such a big sound, such a complex and incredible mix. Great fun to play on the bass. Demon Cleaner also very worth listening to.

I think it helps people not used to communicating online think about different sorts of negative feedback, and how it is important to engage with some, and possibly not with others. Also the “response considerations” were quite good too to encourage transparency and accountability in online communications.

Click on the image for the larger more readable version.

• Mike’s photos
• Jenny’s photos
• Mary’s photos
• Alegrya’s photos
• Nathanael’s photos

Favourites:

One of my favourite photos is here, by Jenny, but I can’t insert it for some reason.

Mike Carden - fires and moon

Mary's photo of Po

Ghostly gums by Alison

Sparkly Alice by Alison

Lovely fire photo by Nathanael

GikII noobs be warned: this is a conference with the boring bits left out, and the level of ‘geek’ cranked right up. (GikII, FWIW, is the tragic love-spawn of an Information Institute and a ligil geek.)

I’ll be speaking about being a geek in the political machine.

1. Went with Kate to the “Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas” metadata conference for a couple of hours, where the people opening it spoke about the importance of metadata, and openness. I’ve been told all talk slides will be on that website after the conference and Kate will post her speech on her website probably tomorrow.
2. Posted the draft briefing paper from the first Public Sphere topic on high speed bandwidth on the new wiki, and within 30 mins had the first contribution! I believe this is the first use of a wiki for public engagement by an Australian Parliamentarian, very exciting stuff!
3. Met with some interesting folk to talk about virtual environments, discussed importance of open APIs and standards, and am considering eventually doing a Public Sphere in a fully virtual environment (easily months down the track!).
4. Coordinated some material to go into the vodcasts we are doing, and helped another staffer at Kate’s office to look at how to use the website to garner online feedback on an important topic. She’ll likely be also engaging the Facebook community on the topic and it was very satisfying to have the staffer exclaim surprise and happiness that they could directly engage on the website with these newfangled tools
5. Dropped down to the “Copyright Commons; Copyright Freedom” conference which featured amazing international speakers such as Lawrence Lessig (US) and Prodromos Tsiavos (UK, wrote a great paper called Cultivating Creative Commons: From Creative Regulation to Regulatory Commons),  and awesome copyright guru Aussies such as David Vaile, Brian Fitzgerald, Prof Graham Greenleaf, Anne Fitzgerald and Jessica Coates. Recorded an amazing audio interview between Kate and Larry Lessig, which we’ll podcast tomorrow, but I was particularly pleased with their responses to “what is the link between copyright freedom and open government”. They mostly just chatted and shared ideas, which makes it pretty cool listening (I think anyway ). Kate gave a fantastic speech which she’ll also post tomorrow. Larry recognised me from a conference I met him at many years ago in Brazil, which was impressive (as  he was totally jet lagged that day).
6. As part of going to the copyright conference, had my first visit to Old Parliament House, a beautiful building and definitely worth visiting.
7. Was invited to speak at an eclectic event for geeks to share fringe geek interests and talks, and I’ll likely talk on “being a geek in Parliament House”. Will post more information once I have it.
8. Was chatting to Liam Wyatt from Wikimedia Australia about the upcoming GLAM-WIKI seminar (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia). The idea is “a two-way dialogue to determine how to use the two communities’ strengths to a mutual advantage”, should be really interesting!

So although it has been a 15 hour day (who says public servants don’t do long hours!) it has been amazing. I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of this “policy advisor” thing, and one of my main initial goals of being a conduit to the community and industry is working out nicely with the public spheres and some other projects we are working on

As David Vaile so eloquently put today, I’m as happy as a pig in mud, and energised enough to be up and blogging at 4am, time to go sleep…